Healthcare providers focus on quality for the next phase of digital transformation

As healthcare providers emerge from the operational disruptions caused by the global pandemic, IT and business leaders are renewing their focus on “quality”– specifically, have digital investments provided quality and value for IT systems; is technology improving quality for caregivers inside facilities; and have digital transformation efforts enhanced the patient experience and the quality of care they’re receiving?

Trent Sanders, director of U.S. Healthcare & Life Sciences at Kyndryl, says much has changed for healthcare providers over the past three years. “2020 was reaction mode,” he says. “Healthcare providers kept the lights on and sprinted to solve problems like suddenly having to serve 50% of your population via telehealth.”

In 2021, he says, healthcare providers could see a light at the end of the tunnel, “so there was a lot of planning and preparation to open back up.”

2022, he says, “is all about action and execution. That’s why we’re seeing significant pressure at the board level around technology value realization – are we getting results from the areas where we placed our bets?”

The key for success in many of these new digital transformation efforts will be collaborating with partners in areas such as technology modernization, security, data, and artificial intelligence (AI). “Companies like Amazon and Kyndryl are coming together to help organizations and their employees perform,” says Sanders. “This concept is especially true in healthcare, where many companies are ingrained in decades-old processes that inhibit their ability to modernize.”

Many digital transformation efforts require a level of digital expertise that many organizations are not equipped to handle. “Hospitals and large payer institutions are not in the core business of IT,” Sanders says. “They are in the core business of how to improve the caregiver experience and improve the member population.”

It’s safe to say that healthcare providers, just like organizations in most industries, have moved some applications or workloads to the cloud. But there’s been a slower shift of mission-critical workloads, which in the case of healthcare providers include electronic health records (EHR) applications and imaging systems. Moving those systems to the cloud to make them more scalable, more secure, and more accessible – and enhancing them with advanced analytics and AI capabilities – is an important next step.

“It’s now about taking great technology, great services, and merging together in a programmatic approach to align to better caregiver and patient outcomes,” says Sanders. “Moving an EHR system to the cloud is not the outcome. The outcome is what you can do with it once it’s there.

“It’s also about the services that you wrap around it,” he says. “For example, taking advantage of AWS’s AI and machine learning capabilities to do population and health modeling much faster than you could before.”

The scale, performance, and advanced capabilities of the cloud will help healthcare organizations justify future investments in digital transformation to drive better caregiver and patient experiences and improve the quality of healthcare.

Learn more about how Kyndryl and AWS are innovating to help healthcare providers and other organizations achieve transformational business outcomes.